A pixelated Faraday cup for proton beam diagnostics

Abstract Diagnostics tools are largely used to tune and set up beams in a vast range of applications. They include particle and nuclear physics, medical physics up to material science and biology, just to mention a few. The requirements on the detectors used to monitor the beam condition accordingly with the specific case. We present here a pixelated Faraday cup we built and used for beam profile monitoring with the peculiar characteristic of simultaneously measuring the proton beam position, shape and intensity. The detector covers a large range of currents from a hundred μ A down to a few nA perfectly matching the range of the proton beam intensity delivered by a 1 MeV Cockcroft–Walton accelerator. The pixel size allows for a beam position determination better than 1 mm.